The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  There was a problem, however. Lifeboats on the port side were flooded with splash from the torpedo, and crew members were discussing whether they would stay afloat. Bourke-White noticed two of the nurses trembling uncontrollably. Her own mouth felt terribly dry. “This must be fear,” she thought, realizing she had no idea what was going to happen to her. “There’s a fifty percent chance you will live. There’s a fifty percent chance you might die.” This was true of all of them, she thought, but some people seemed to have a hidden well of courage, like the two Wacs who, when their lifeboat became overloaded, stepped out of line with a cheerful “Oh, of course, we can’t all go,” and watched it lowered without them.

  In her piece in Life, Bourke-White wrote of her astonishment at finding herself in the lifeboat with water up to her hips.

  The sea, which from above had looked so calm, rose up against us wave after wave and began beating us back against the side of the ship. Our crew strained at the oars. There was so little space left in our crowded boat that we started singing, bending our bodies in rhythm to give the rowers room to move their arms. Just as we had created a small margin between ourselves and the big ship, down came lifeboat No. 11 with its load of British sisters. Its crew had been unable to replace the plugs properly and it filled to the gunwales. A couple of dozen sisters were washed over the side. Some of them were carried immediately back into their flooded boat on the next wave. Others started swimming toward rafts which were tossed from the upper deck.

  At that point, the rudder on Bourke-White’s boat broke, the oarsmen needed help rowing, and everyone wearing a helmet took it off and started bailing. Many were seasick from the boat tossing about, but at least they had a boat. Already the dark sea was filled with people struggling to hold on to rafts. One raft drifted in their direction, and they pulled the young woman riding it, who had broken her leg, into their boat. The nurses held her tight to keep her from bouncing with each swell. Margaret never forgot a voice off in the blackness crying, “I am all alone! I am all alone!” They tried to steer their rudderless boat in her direction, but the voice grew fainter and then stopped altogether. As the rowers, too, became seasick from the constant swell, they were spelled at the oars by the less squeamish, including Margaret and the “splendid Elspeth Duncan,” the best rower of all. With time, survival began to appear likely. A raft of soldiers drifted by, and no fewer than nine young men were transferred into their already overcrowded boat. Later another lifeboat approached with three heavily loaded rafts roped to it. Nurses in the boat passed lighted cigarettes back to the men on the rafts. Somebody started to sing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” and others took it up. People felt able to joke a little.

  The moon sank, large and golden, into the sea. For a while only stars lit the sky, but as Bourke-White watched, puffy clouds on the horizon picked up the light of dawn. As soon as she could, she pulled out her camera and mounted the gunwales of the bobbing boat to photograph her fellow passengers. A British flying boat overhead spotted them, and they waved back wildly. Not far off a destroyer from their convoy began picking up survivors, and before long they too were aboard. In the general relief they learned that only two soldiers had died, although a number of nurses had suffered twisted ankles or broken bones. People felt in their pockets to confirm what had made it through: Margaret had her Rolleiflex and her Linhof, Jeanne Dixon (Ike’s secretary) her prayer book, and Kay Summersby her lipstick.

  Bourke-White concluded her piece in Life:

  I climbed again to the gun station. Far over on the horizon our mother ship was still afloat. She was listing much lower to port now and destroyers were taking off all the troops that were left. The hundreds of survivors on our destroyer watched the mother ship disappear in the distance. She had meant something very special to all of us. She had stood by us through 60-ft waves and 70-mile-an-hour gales. When wounded she had held up until the last living man was removed from her decks. Our destroyer picked up speed now and before the day was over we sighted the purple hills of Africa.

  In the heady emotion of stepping onto solid land, the importance of lost clothes and cameras faded to insignificance. She was alive; she was whole; she had met the challenge of a truly frightening experience without panic; she had her photographs and vivid recollections for a story for Life. Not for the world — let alone for Hollywood — would she have traded that.

  In contrast to Bourke-White’s England-to-North Africa voyage, Ruth Cowan’s trip all the way from America in the early weeks of 1943 proved uneventful. She and Inez Callaway Robb, an INS reporter from New York who had joined her, were in the mid-Atlantic before the Wacs were informed that their destination was not England but Africa. No one seemed to mind. Everyone was determinedly roughing it, Cowan reported, fourteen to a cabin in bunk beds, no sheets, pillows, or hot water — no fresh water at all except for drinking. They wore their army fatigues day and night, and never left their rooms without life jackets. Despite several U-boat alerts, the convoy reached Algiers without incident.

  There was plenty of “incident” awaiting Cowan in Algiers, however. The head of the AP office, Wes Gallagher, had not been consulted on the subject of attaching a woman reporter to his unit. A recognized misogynist, he suggested that when Cowan’s ship returned to the United States, she should be on it. Robb’s welcome at INS was warmer, but both women had trouble with General Robert McClure, U.S. Army public relations officer, who was all wrought up about women reporters in a combat zone. Ruth thought she had put the “no women” rules behind her long ago, and was distressed to face the same prejudice again. She did not really mind, she said, eating alone in her room in Rabat when the press corps dining room steward refused to serve her on the grounds that it was a stag mess. Exclusion was practiced in some Washington press circles, too. Harder to take was the cold-shouldering by Gallagher, his refusal to assign her any stories or afford her transport to the WAAC area. But she had ferreted out her own news before, and would do so again.

  Still, Cowan could not resist one act of protest. At the wireless office she wrote out a telegram to a good friend: Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. She knew the first lady strongly supported her present undertaking, but now Ruth cautioned her to desist. “Don’t encourage more women to come to Africa,” the wire read. “The men don’t want us here.” The wire never left the country, as Cowan suspected it would not, but word of it got around, and the atmosphere around military personnel improved. It would not look good for a friend of the commander in chief’s wife to be treated shabbily while trying to do her job, no matter what one’s private opinion on the wisdom of her having been given that job.

  The home offices of AP and INS expected a variety of stories from their women correspondents, and Cowan and Robb did their best to comply. Although they traveled together much of the time, their stories were surprisingly dissimilar. Robb’s were breezy anecdotes of the American soldier’s life overseas, lighthearted and optimistic in tone. Her reports from an evacuation hospital made no mention of nurses being tired or injuries serious; she recorded the joking banter of the young patients in the ward, the kind of thing considered reassuring to the folks back home. That may have been the directive given her. If so, it was unfortunate, because it lent her reporting no weight, as she herself must have been aware.

  Cowan’s pieces had more depth and texture. Her readers, if not exactly on the battlefield, at least knew they were behind the lines of a recognizable war. One day Ruth visited an evacuation hospital in an open valley high in the Tunisian mountains. It was marked by a great white cross made of sheets spread out on a field and held down by rocks. The campaign was not going well, and American forces in the area were retreating. The surgical hospital farther to the front had been disbanded, Ruth reported, and their evac hospital had become frondine. “I never thought women could live a life so hard as that of these nurses,” Cowan wrote. It was bitterly cold, and while some of them had small oil stoves in their tents, others did not.
They slept two to a tent on army cots, and heated water for bathing and laundering in discarded biscuit tins. On duty they were always neady dressed in their blue seersucker uniforms, blue sweaters, and traditional white stockings, shoes, and aprons. Ruth’s account was one of many paeans to American nurses during the war.

  Margaret Bourke-White experienced none of Cowan’s difficulties with military authorities in North Africa. When her clothes went down with her ship, Major General Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the Twelfth Air Force, North Africa, loaned her some of his, and had her flown to the Ninety-seventh Bomb Group air base on an oasis in the Sahara. Romantically dubbed the Garden of Allah, the oasis was in fact swept by stinging sands, hot by day and cold by night. Its few buildings were in ruins from regular bombing.

  But for Bourke-White, the Garden of Allah was her reward on earth after her recent troubles. The Ninety-seventh was her own bomb group from England, and its commanding officer the same Colonel J. Hampton Atkinson present at the christening of the Flying Flitgun. Shortly after her arrival at the air base, the tall, lean, and good-looking Atkinson was promoted to brigadier general, affording Margaret an excuse to give a party in his honor. This not very subtle sign of her feelings inspired like sentiments in the new general, and before long they were openly sharing quarters. As her biographer, Vicki Goldberg, noted: “In the evening, when the entertainment was over, she left with the general, while every man there dreamed of what it might be like if she had left with him.” The liaison provided delicious gossip for both military headquarters in North Africa and Time-Life offices in New York. Neither the general nor the photographer cared. He was the captain of the football team and she was his sweetheart — welcome tonic for a woman whose ex-husband had just taken another wife, one half his age, and hers.

  Margaret Bourke-White attired for a bombing mission, North Africa, 1943.

  MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE/TIME MAGAZINE.

  Besides, there was her work, and as Bourke-White observed, “You can do one of two things: put your mind on your work, or worry about what people are saying about you. The two do not mix.” When General Doolittle asked if she wanted to go on a bombing mission — an opportunity still rare even for male photographers — she did not hesitate. It was the obvious next challenge in her skyrocketing career. With cameras loaned by the signal corps, she practiced for a week how she would operate inside the big B-17. The severe cold would necessitate electric mittens, making everything that much more difficult. On the hot desert floor she donned layer after layer of flying apparel, plus an oxygen mask, and rehearsed manipulating the cameras in and out of the best shooting spots in the plane’s interior.

  Later Bourke-White wrote that she did not recall having given a thought to the fact that the expedition into which she was putting so much effort was a mission of death. Perhaps she could not afford to consider that her target might include human beings, even civilians, any more than that her plane might be hit and she not return. The flight, she wrote, had “its own equipment, its own rules, even its own morals.” The Flying Fortresses set off at dawn for El Aouina airfield near Tunis. In the lead plane, Bourke-White began at once to photograph the crewmen at their positions, including the bombardier when he went back to pull the safety devices from the bombs. As the plane gained altitude, they donned oxygen masks. A portable oxygen bottle allowed Margaret to move about, from the waist gunner’s port to the radio gunner’s hatch, until the moment they were over the target and she heard the command “Bombs away!”

  After her plane had unloaded its cargo, banked, and turned, it began a dipping and weaving evasive action to avoid the antiaircraft fire from below, offering her a variety of angles to shoot from. Her involuntary squeals of delight came through over the interphone. With no little amusement the crew heard “Oh, that’s just what I want, that’s a beautiful angle!” followed by “Hold me this way so I can shoot straight down.” For a woman who began her career shooting from the protruding beams of skyscrapers, the flight was a consummate experience.

  The mission, too, was a success. Indications were that as many as forty German planes had been destroyed. Life gave her story seven pages, and included a small picture of the photographer in all her flying regalia. The caption called her “the first woman ever to fly with a U.S. combat crew over enemy soil.” This was true. Not true was their claim that all the planes had returned intact. Two Flying Fortresses had gone down, two crews had not returned, but Life did not think its readers needed to know about that.

  The American military must have wished they could obscure their own setback so easily. The retreat Ruth Cowan had reported on the southern Tunisian front was not checked, and as the Germans continued to advance, all nonessential Americans were ordered to leave the area. Cowan and Robb knew that “nonessential” included them. In the company of four officers, they headed for the rear in a courier auto that soon broke down, leaving them to pile their bedrolls, knapsacks, and typewriters at a fork in the road and take turns thumbing a lift. Eventually a colonel managed to secure a weapons carrier that could be spared long enough to take them to the nearest town, where they spent the night, hopping a ride in a transport the next morning.

  In March 1943 Robb returned to the United States, and Cowan left North Africa for England. It could not be said that their participation in the North African campaign had been a success. This may have been partly the fault of their inexperience with the military, but surely far greater blame lies with their superiors who could have aided them if they had chosen to. Wes Gallagher’s silent treatment of Cowan was humiliating — unforgivable considering that she had been employed by the AP for twelve years and was there under its auspices. General McClure never became reconciled to either woman’s presence. When their negative attitude on women reporters was questioned, both men claimed it was the personalities of these particular women that was the problem. In 1943, that was still an acceptable thing to say.

  17

  Touching Base on Five Continents

  Among women in any field at a given time, there will be one or two who possess “star quality.” Their work is their signature; they are true originals. Around them hangs the aura of the exotic. Dorothy Thompson was such a person. Another was Lee Miller.

  By early 1942 Elizabeth Lee Miller had been living in England for nearly three years, working as a photographer for British Vogue. Although most of her friends were British, she regularly encountered American journalists, including women who now were in uniform, looked very smart, and carried cards allowing them to shop at the PX (post exchange) for items unobtainable anywhere else. Why should she not do the same?

  Lee Miller, Vogue

  Lee Miller grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, the only daughter in a close and loving family, but two events in her early life shattered an otherwise normal and happy childhood. First, she was sexually molested at the age of seven by the son of family friends, and from that experience contracted venereal disease. The cure for that before the age of penicillin was terrible for a child to endure. In an effort to keep the psychic scars at a minimum, her parents did their best as she grew up to persuade her that sex and love were only minimally connected, that sex was an insignificant part of life. The second event occurred when, as a teenager out rowing one day with her first real boyfriend, she sat helpless while in the space of a few moments he either fell or jumped overboard, suffered heart failure, and died. Lee reacted with mounting rebellion against the incongruities of life. Expelled for “unsuitable” behavior from one school after another, she was at last sent off with two spinster ladies to Paris. In no time she had ditched her chaperones and taken charge of her own future.

  Miller’s deepest emotional bond, perhaps ever, was with her father. When he feared her emancipation might go too far, he went to Paris and brought her home. She entered the Art Students League in New York, by chance met Conde Nast, and began to model for Vogue. Barely twenty, tall and blond with pale blue eyes, she had a kind of detached beauty perfectly suited for the clothes
of the period. Edward Steichen photographed her often. So did others, including her father on her weekend visits home. He had become enamored of stereoscopic photography, and his secret passion was nudes. Lee posed for him, cool and unselfconscious. Taking off her clothes in front of a camera, her family, friends, was natural to her.

  Miller returned to Paris with the goal of becoming a photographer herself. She approached Man Ray and asked to become his pupil; before long she was his lover as well, but it was the work that was important. She learned fast, took her own apartment and studio, set up a darkroom, and won assignments from top fashion houses like Schiaparelli and Chanel. She continued to model, and on the side starred in Jean Cocteau’s film Blood of a Poet. At twenty-five Lee returned to New York where, assisted by her brother, she achieved remarkable success in portrait photography, then threw it up to marry an Egyptian twenty years her senior and move to Cairo. Egypt, however, proved confining. With her husband’s blessing she spent several carefree, hedonistic months traveling in the company of Roland Penrose, who had introduced surrealism in Britain. In the south of France, Picasso painted her with a sunny yellow face, smiling green mouth, and breasts like the sails of ships. She returned to Egypt, but in the summer of 1939 her husband accepted the inevitability of a divorce. Miller left Egypt to travel again with Penrose. They were in Antibes with Picasso and Dora Maar as war clouds loomed, and just made it to a Channel port when Hitler marched into Poland.

  Miller rejected advice to return home, and remained with Penrose in England. She joined British Vogue, but “Brogue,” as it was known, virtually ignored the war. Lee photographed throughout the Blitz and, in collaboration with Ernestine Carter and Edward R. Murrow, published Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire. In fact, the pictures were less grim than they were poetic and surrealist. But with Grim Glory as evidence of her ability, she applied in 1942 to the U.S. Army for accreditation, and was accepted.